


Whatever Comes

by AParisianShakespearean



Series: Dragon Age One Shots [3]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Arm loss angst, Cullen Smut, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Smut, Hurt/Comfort, Morning Sex, Post Tresspasser, Romance, Smut, Smut and Angst, Spooning, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-04
Updated: 2017-07-04
Packaged: 2018-11-23 04:15:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11395149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AParisianShakespearean/pseuds/AParisianShakespearean
Summary: After the events of the Exalted Council, she has not yet healed. He loves her still.Short piece that occurs a few weeks after Tresspasser.





	Whatever Comes

**Author's Note:**

> I had a really bad week and was feeling emotional, which inspired me to write this. Sorry if I keep spamming you with new stories fandom, but I got a lot of things going through my head.

The mornings where he wakes after a restful sleep are few and far between, but when he wakes on this early morning, he wakes in her room from a dreamless sleep.

Even before he wipes the sleep from his eyes, he inches closer to her, resting his head on her pillow. The sun paints her in light, a palette of early dawn outlining her face and bringing out the lighter tones in her dark hair. The blankets do not reach to her shoulder blades, and there, glinting in the sunlight, is his brother’s coin around her neck. Since the day he gave it to her, he knows she has never been without it.

Beautiful brave woman, he thinks. She was beautiful then, the day he gave her the coin. Just as she is beautiful now. If only she would know it.

She stirs, eyes fluttering open. A light, butterfly touch to her cheek is his greeting. Side by side, they lay like that for a while, sapphire eyes on amber. Before, she would reach for him, and greet him with morning kisses. But there is something that holds her back, something that has held her back since they returned from the Exalted Council.

Still, she has not healed.

“I love you,” he murmurs.

She closes her eyes, biting her lip, but the tears still stream down her cheeks. He cups her cheek in his hand as she weeps soundless tears, kissing them away. “I love you so much,” he murmurs again.

“You don’t deserve this.”

“No love, no,” he tells her. “Please, don’t ever think that.”

“Look at me. I can’t fight anymore…I can’t…”

“There is a way,” he assures.

“Cullen, I can’t even hold you how I want to…can’t…”

She turns from him, taking the blanket, and bundling it to her shoulder blades. Tears convulse through her as she buries herself away from him. He rises a little, and for a moment he does not touch her. Since their return to Skyhold she has not spoken about what happened through the Eluvian outside of formal reports and missives. Not a single word has been uttered to him about her loss, but she doesn’t have to. Not for him to know. She has been eating infrequently, sleeps often, and when she has not been sleeping, she only stares at the walls of her bedroom, blank and emotionless. She has been carrying her sadness with her in a bottle, and every time she suppressed her despair, the bottle became fuller and fuller. Cullen knew that it was only a matter of time before the bottle collapsed. Now that it has, he sits with her. He places his hand on her hip and lets her know, that he is here.

Tentatively, he tries to peel the sheets away. She does not protest, and he moves them down to her hip. Her back still toward him, he wraps his arm around her middle, and presses his lips to the curve of her neck.

“I’m so sorry Cullen,” she mutters. “When you married me you probably never thought—"

“I told you that day, I would stand by you, no matter what comes.”

“Before the Exalted Council, I thought once it was over, we could begin again.”

“We can begin again,” he assures her.

“But Solas—"

“There is a future for us. I’m know there is. We only need to find it.”

He further presses his body to hers, lips brushing against her shoulder blade as he finds her hand and interlocks their fingers. “We’ll find a way,” he promises.

“May I tell you something?” She asks, after a moment.

“Always.”

There is a pause. “After we returned from Exalted Council,” she slowly reveals, “Cullen…”

“What is it?”

She bits her lip. “I realized that my bleeding didn’t come.”

His heart rate quickens. They hardly have spoken of children, but when he took her to South Reach to meet his family, he saw how her eyes lit up as she met his nephew. After that, she had mentioned the passing fantasy, one of the two of them together with several blonde-haired children pattering near. Yet they pushed aside those fantasies, agreeing to speak of them later. At the time, the Inquisition still had work to be done. They pushed their fantasies aside in place of their duty. He didn’t allow the image before, one of him placing his hand on her growing belly, feeling their child move for the first time underneath his fingertips. But now he thinks of that image, and he swells with longing for it.

He still swells with that longing, even after she tells him that her bleeding did come after a few days, and it was only late. “When I thought about having your child, I was never happier,” she says. “I imagined telling you, how happy you would be, everything. But then, when I thought about holding them for the first time, and realized I couldn’t, I…”

She closes her eyes, and more tears stream down her face. Once again, he kisses them away. “You can,” he says. “You can.”

“I’m not strong enough. Not for this.”

“You are, you are,” he chants, tasting the salt of her tears as he kisses her, slowly so he can savor the sensation, the taste of her. Not since their wedding day have they kissed like this, and as her hand outstretches, slipping through his unkempt waves, he deepens their kiss until there is only the sensation of her. When her hand travels to the strap of her nightgown, he understands her intention. He helps her slip it over her head, and as soon as it is discarded he begins rocking his hips, cupping her breasts as they roll in his palm. She pleads with him, shivering at his stubble on her bare back, pleads with him to have her now. Slowly then, he peels off his smalls. She drapes her leg over his, and he slips inside of her.

The strangled cry she makes is not foreign to him, but he relishes it after their brief time spent in celibacy. They make love this way, side by side, her hips rolling into his. With one of his hands locked with hers, he somehow manages to wrap his other arm around her. He envelopes her until she is wrapped in a cocoon, bringing her away from the old world and into a new one, one with only the two of them. He is a gentle as he moves within her, rhythmic in his slow and steady assertion of his love. Eventually she moans for him, and when she moves onto her stomach, he follows.

She angles herself just so, placing her knees onto the bed, that when he slides inside her again, he is able to push himself deep inside her wet folds. He gives a sharp intake of breath. Feeling her this was is something else entirely. They have hardly ever made love this way, as this was the way he usually preferred it in the days before her, when these things were only a primal need that needed to be satiated. And before she has said she loves feeling his weight atop her, just as he loves holding her as she drapes her body atop his. He supposed he always dismissed this way as lacking romantic passion, as there is no eye contact and little room for sensuality in the primal nature of it. Yet now, as he grasps onto her, he recognizes that there is something about this that makes it truly intimate. Perhaps it is the way she trusts him, surrendering herself in a sense. Or, the answer may lie in that wide gap of time when he reframed from being with her, and now that they are together at last, they are loud and vocal, and unrestrained. It doesn’t matter either way, he rationalizes. She is warm and familiar, and making love to her will always have that intimate passion he has never had with any of his lovers past, because it is only with her that he is really Cullen.

His hand finds her clit, and it only takes a few circular motions for her to come undone, collapsing onto the bed. As his end draws nearer, he blankets her body over his, chest against her back. When she utters his name, whispers words of how she will never leave him, and then, tells him she loves him, he spills his seed inside of her with a low and strangled cry.

He remains for a few moments, only withdrawing himself when he fears his body is too hard against hers. He skims his hand down her back and kisses the bare skin as she lays spent, his reminder that he is here, and he will not leave. He will never leave, no matter what comes.

She flips over, capturing his lips. The feel of her lips and tongue, and the playful scrape of teeth gives him delicious frissons, and when she parts, he rests his forehead on hers. Just like he did the first morning that they spent together, after making love for the first time.

“Cullen,” she beckons softly. “I want…I want us to have a child.”

He moves down and kisses her belly, willing it to happen, for this time to be the time. “We will,” he promises.

“I know it won’t be easy,” she says.

“Is there anything that’s easy?”

She touches his cheek. “Loving you.”

She now, is the one that wipes the tears away as they fall from his eyes. “No,” he says. “Loving you is easy.”

“Even after everything?”

His mind recollects the days before her as she lays below him, where love, marriage, a future with a woman was nothing but a passing fantasy. In those days he never imagined a perfect woman for himself, and he knows now that was only because his imagination would never have been able to form a shape so like herself. He sees her now, as the Inquisitor, world shaker, the one that overcame. The woman who will be the mother to his children.

“Especially after everything,” he answers. But truthfully, he knows. She is more beautiful now than she ever was, because of everything she overcame. And she overcame it all, to be with him. She is with him now for this one perfect moment. But it is only one perfect moment, laying amidst the garden of all the other perfect moments that have yet to come.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed. Kudos, comments and the like give me the fuzzies :)


End file.
